so, this might suck. It's my first time doing this and it's a little obscure. But, here goes!

"Good evening." My body stiffened as he spoke. I was suddenly aware of every small hair on every square inch of my body as they began to stand on end. Starting with my arms, up and down my back and to my legs, even the small blonde hairs on my ankles were standing on end. It was like electric fear, surging at a billion miles an hour through every synapse right through to each respective nerve ending. How could this be? My whole life since as far as I can remember I've known this man. This shadowy figure who has stood in the corner of my room, watching silently. Sometimes I would stare at him for hours. The longer I would stare the more my brain would try and find patterns in the chaos of this void of a man. It would appear as if he was morphing, like a black velvet liquid running down the corner of my nearly empty pedestrian-beige bedroom. Sometimes it appeared he was smiling, other times casting me a menacing glare and other times silently laughing as his dark void of a body ran like goo down my bedroom wall. On several occasions it looked like he was approaching me, almost flickering closer as if popping to some other dimension and then back to my reality, with each flicker he seemed closer. I would blink, a nervous deliberate heavy lidded blink, and he would be right back where he always is, occupying that corner that I hated. And yet, throughout all this time, the man had never uttered a single word.

I don't know why I never called for my parents, or why I never begged to change bedrooms. We had a perfectly normal guest bedroom that sat mostly unoccupied, except for the odd Christmas or Thanksgiving when it was used for my aunt to pass-out in after countless bottles of Chat-En-Oeuf Merlot. I suppose, even at a young age, I knew my parents wouldn't believe me. That my calls for help would be overlooked as the delusional ramblings of a nightmare stricken child. So, I kept my mouth shut. Staring for hours into the man's void, sometimes wondering what would happen if I approached or touched him. I imagined I would fall through him and disappear into wherever he came from, probably some dark demented place filled with black tar and other menacing tall shadowy figures. I never found the bravery to move the blankets away from my chin, where I had my blankets pulled up to in a childish attempt to protect myself. Wherever he came from, is not where I wanted to be.

I've spent my whole life mostly alone, my voice being small and going unnoticed by my over worked, under-paid parents who mostly forgot they had a small son. A son who needed their guidance and their affection. When I started school, I remember feeing excited on my first day. Sitting in the back seat having childish non-linear daydreams about friends, toys and being free of the loneliness of a home where my parents were only in the background and my best friend was Steve in his green striped shirt with his little blue dog. Daydreams a child of five shouldn't have. My dreams and hopes of being granted freedom from solitude went largely unanswered. That day, I played alone too.

I looked at the man, who chose the foot of my bed on this night to break his 11 year long silence. I glanced behind him to his corner, unoccupied for the first time in memory. I was taken aback by the sight of that small empty space that I had grown so accustomed to him filling up. I was still a boy. What could he want from me? What could I possibly give to him?

"The time is nigh, boy." He said, the deep wispy voice seemingly coming from nowhere but everywhere all at once. It sounded as if his breath was carried on dandelion spores, fragmented, moving in all directions.

I felt myself drawn to him. I couldn't understand what was pulling me towards him, the fear in me was recoiling from his dark and ghastly appearance that had scared me for so many years. Yet still, I began to move towards him. I felt myself seperate from my body. It was as if I was moving forward through time and yet moving backwards in time at once. I was suddenly aware of my entire existence. I looked at my hands and it was as if I was seeing them from utero, growing into adulthood, aging, dying and withering as the nails separating from the nail beds while my hands shrivelled with decay and back to utero again in an infinite loop. I looked away from my hands and back to the man. We were now standing together in what I could only describe as an infinite space of incredibly complex geometry. Fractal swirls of colour seemed to perfectly contrast the dark man beside me. The space we were in felt like part of me, part of this man and part of everything that ever was and ever will be.

My 11 year old self, suddenly became ancient. The childlike innocence and the sadness of a life left ignored by all who touched it, was dead.

I knew in that moment, which wasn't a moment at all but all of time weaving in and out of itself in a perfectly formed tetrahedron, that this man was who I associated with goo and treachery was here to free me.

In that infinite moment, I was grateful. I was him, I was all things and I was free. This is where I wanted to be.